Descripció del projecte
Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) has been in the spotlight during the last decades, however, in recent years it has made the breakthrough gaining more applicability in various sectors in society. So much so its application has been extended in different scenarios where the use of wired power delivery must be avoided due to need and/or convenience. Consequently, its use is widely spread in the medical and industrial sector, being nowadays trending in consumer electronics and electric vehicles.
Inductive coupled power transfer encloses two main parts to realize wireless power transmission: the magnetic design of the coils and the electronics design. Often, in both cases, these blocks must be customized for each application. This event opens up a wide range of possibilities in terms of design parameters, while at the same time imposes considerable effort to optimally configure the different parameters for each application scenario.
Unreasonable system parameter settings will cause frequency bifurcation phenomenon, increasing system losses without improving power and efficiency. To overcome such a situation, efforts have been directed towards the optimization where authors have presented different techniques in order to address the optimization of coil parameters. Some of them have introduced the optimization by combining magnetics and electronics without considering the full range of electronic configurations. Therefore, less attention has been paid to electronics design and despite being of significant importance in an IPT setup there is no evidence of optimization specifically applied to it.
A common implementation of IPT electronics is covered by its four main blocks: (1) the inverter, (2) the transmitter tuning network, (3) the receiver tuning network and (4) the rectifier and/or regulator. The complete process of designing a full IPT system involves the following disadvantages. (a) It requires a highly experienced designer to perform the design process, (b) often based on trial and error that consists on iterating the design parameters, where (c) in most cases not all possible topologies are considered for each block. Thus, the IPT electronics design process is tedious often leading to a suboptimal solution oversized for the required application.
The project proposes to blend the knowledge of electronics and the application of optimization. The objective of the student is to optimize the structure design of IPT electronics based on system blocks behavioral models that require a study of the existing topologies applicable to each of the main blocks composing the IPT electronics. In consequence, it must be concluded with a Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tool capable of optimizing the electronics structure design, characterized by more than one input parameter. This will speed up the electronics design process minimizing the time employed in the design phase and simulation for any IPT application.
The work can be split into four main points: 1) perform a study of the different topologies that constitute each of the previously mentioned electronics blocks in a IPT system; 2) perform the mathematical modeling of each of the topologies embodying the nonlinear behavior of the components in each case; 3) search for the most suitable way of optimization considering more than one input parameter according to the interest of the application such as cost, dimensions, efficiency, mounting, power, among others; 4) apply the optimization and create an EDA tool to determine the most suitable topology for each IPT electronics block, as well as the most suitable values of the components that form them.
